


Moths, and Spiders, Too

by orphan_account



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Implied Dollar Bill/Mothman, Kurt Vonnegut Pastiche, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 08:04:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10895166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Listen:Byron Lewis has come unstuck in time.





	Moths, and Spiders, Too

Listen:

Byron Lewis has come unstuck in time.

It is 1958, and Byron steps from the doorway of a funeral home into a field hospital in 1942. Later, in 1946, Byron sips whiskey from a glass that, by the time he has set it down, has become a club soda, and is spilling onto a gray carpet that he does not recognize. In 1983, a young gentleman walks with Byron through the garden of a mental hospital, and as they step together over a low hedge, Byron instead finds himself stepping over a chair in 1925, the young gentleman replaced by his vice principal. 

Byron is scared of a lot of things, but not of this. 

*

They put Byron in an asylum, though not because he is unstuck in time. They put him in an asylum because he lost his mind. It was the drinking that did it, most people believe, but Byron thinks that it was mostly his courage that did him in. Most people learn how to be courageous at a young age. They tell a bully off, or don’t tell a frightening secret, or do tell a frightening secret, or run into a busy street before their friends can go _bawk-bawk-bawk chicke-e-en_. It took Byron so long to figure out how to be courageous that by the time he did, he had no idea what to do with it. So he drank. Sometimes drinking helped manage the courage. Sometimes drinking made the courage mean, and on the day he was put into an asylum, that’s what the drinking did, and ever since then they didn’t let him drink, and his courage all dried up.

Now he is an old, old man. He sits in the rooms they tell him to sit in, and he walks around the asylum grounds when they tell him to walk, and he takes his medicine, and he talks politely to the black nurse and impolitely to the cranky old man two rooms down who only ever calls the black nurse slurs. 

The orderlies are impressed by his good behavior. He doesn’t need them to feed him, or wipe him after he uses the bathroom, or read to him, so they leave him alone.

Nobody ever visits him. 

He has plenty of time to visit other places, and to drink in other times. 

*

Byron was born in 1910 to Arthur and Janet Lewis, who were fabulously wealthy thanks to their parents and to Arthur Lewis’ work in real estate. Arthur wasn’t there when Byron finally left his exhausted mother’s womb. It was very lucky for Byron, to be born to such wealthy people. It was very lucky for him to have been born at all, given the chances. 

In fact, it shouldn’t have been possible for Byron to be born at all. The night of his conception, Arthur Lewis never put his penis inside of his wife. He humped her laboriously in their wedding bed, and when he finished, he rolled over and passed out. Fully awake and worried about her body facing another nine unproductive months, Janet climbed out of bed and hunted down the servant who looked the most similar to Arthur, and begged him to not pull out when he came.

It worked out in the end. Most things do.

*

For the first nineteen years of Byron’s life, he studied, and behaved, and spent time with Buttons and Frank and dead poets. He was intelligent, though didn’t have enough sense for it to matter much. He watched his parents and wanted desperately to be like them, and wanted desperately to be unlike them, and picked the easiest option at the time. Byron picked the easiest option a lot, when he was young.

It wasn’t until he was 29 that he committed what he believed was his first brave act. This first brave act consisted of dressing up as a moth and punching a drunk man in the face. The drunk man didn’t put up any fight after that. He screamed a lot of obscenities at Byron and held his nose, which was bleeding. Byron walked him to a hospital. The nurses there wore white and blue, and asked Byron several questions, then let him go. 

None of them asked why he was dressed like a moth. He wished they had. He had a lot of feelings about dressing up in a costume, even though he’d only been doing it for a day, feelings that he knew he could articulate if he just had the chance. He guessed the nurses just wanted to do their jobs. Nurses, he knew, had very hard jobs, with very little time for deep philosophy. Nurses did not make a quarter of what his father made. They probably did not make a tenth of what his father made. 

Byron had a lot of thoughts about that, too, but it made people angry when you pointed out to them they were poor. He didn’t want to make the nurses mad. So he answered their questions and went back outside. 

There were moths and beetles clustered around the door. “Hello,” he said to them. 

Their shadows flickered back, “Hello,” in moth-language. 

*

When the war started, Byron wrote a lot of letters. Most of the letters were to people he knew in college. Some of the letters were to the masked men and women he met after college, and who brought the letters in and asked him why a letter seemed like a better idea than just talking to them. Thinking about the war scared him. He knew that America would get involved, because war made money, and America was an entrepreneurial country, which meant that they would do anything they could to make a quick buck. 

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Byron was so scared that he couldn’t sleep. He drank and couldn’t sleep. He smoked opium and couldn’t sleep. 

He wrote another letter, requesting that he be listed as a conscientious objector. He kept that letter in his typewriter and drank, and drank a little bit more, and then typed out his last paragraph as carefully as he could. Each strike of the keys felt like pulling a gun’s trigger. _If possible, I would like to serve as close to the front lines as possible._ Byron felt that such a sentence could not be retracted, not ever. He was proud to have written such a sentence. 

He signed the letter, and put it in the mailbox on the corner. He slept like a baby.

The Army, as it turned out, was happy to have him as a medic.

*

There is another person who, like Byron, is unstuck in time. His real name is Jonathan Osterman, but everyone calls him Dr. Manhattan. It’s a much more fitting name, Byron thinks, than Jon. When he walks into a room, he inspires awe, and terror, and the urgent need to urinate. Byron has never inspired any of those things.

They met long after Byron came unstuck. Dr. Manhattan’s handshake started in 1960 and ended in 1978. They both knew what was happening, but neither of them acknowledged it except to finish the handshake. 

That’s what you do. No matter how unpleasant the person or how strange the meeting, you finish the social niceties. Byron never bothered to unlearn those. He always believed they were more useful if they were just extended out to everybody and everything, instead of being eradicated. That’s why he says hello to his nurses, and to strangers, and to moths and spiders, too. He also says hello because social niceties suggest that people say hello back when you say hello, and that’s usually the only thing people ever say to Byron, other than “how are you”—and it doesn’t matter whether they really care how he is, because at least they asked.

*

Byron was one of the men who made it back from the war. A lot of boys didn’t. Some, like Bill Brady, made it back but didn’t survive, anyway.

It was a hot night in July of 1946 when Byron first came unstuck in time. It wasn’t to go very far. He went from his bedroom to the bathroom, and on his way back to his bedroom, he found himself in his bedroom from the day before. Someone else was still in his bed, half-asleep.

He thought he was going crazy. He wasn’t. That wouldn’t happen until 1962. He was just traveling through time.

He found out early on that going through time didn’t mean you got to change anything.

*

The government decided, in 1950, that masked heroes were suspicious. Byron had, at that point, already seen what was going to happen: He would attend a hearing. Gentlemen in black suits would ask him questions about his past and hear what he is saying without listening. Their expressions would be stern. He would leave assuming that he was going to be arrested, or killed. He wouldn’t be. He would wake up and go to sleep and wake up again and go to sleep again, for days and days and days. He would attend Minutemen meetings. He would be arrested in Alabama, and be released because he is white and born from old money. He would go home and, a year later, lose his mind. He would spend a very long time in an asylum. A young gentleman would walk with him on the grounds, and wait patiently every time he stopped to say hello to the moths, and to the spiders, too. 

*

In November of 1985, millions of people will die. Byron will become, to his knowledge, the only person left on Earth who can travel through time.

And then, after many more days, he will die. If his will is followed, he will be buried next to Frank Madison and his wife. He doesn’t know if that happens, but he hopes it does.


End file.
